Atlanta’s political powerhouse
By Meliqueica Meadows
Of the St. Louis American
Pioneering Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin will share her insights on public education at this year’s St. Louis American Foundation Salute to Excellence in Education Scholarship and Awards Banquet, to be held September 15 at America’s Center, presented by Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc.
Franklin last visited St. Louis in October, when Mayor Francis G. Slay and FUSE Advertising owners Cliff and Sharilyn Franklin hosted a fundraiser in support of her re-election bid, which she won in a landslide one month later with more than 90 percent of the vote.
Among many creative moves as mayor, Franklin has offered to meet individually with all 2,000 Atlanta senior-level students in an effort to encourage them to pursue higher education. This has involved face-to-face Saturday meetings with more than 700 students per year.
“Schools systems do better when public officials embrace them. You need to meet youth halfway to encourage them to be successful,” Franklin said.
“Money is not the issue here. Engagement is the key. The only way we are going to have a strong country is to have an educated work force.”
Elected as Atlanta’s first African-American female mayor in 2001, Franklin is the only black woman in history to head a major Southern city. Considered a political maverick, she is credited with turning the city around and restoring the public’s trust in city government following the Bill Campbell era, which ended shamefully with his recent tax evasion conviction. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
Franklin’s latest coup was helping to save the valuable collection of papers belonging to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which were originally scheduled to be auctioned off to the highest bidder at Sotheby’s in New York. Franklin was instrumental in stalling the auction, then raising $32 million to purchase the papers.
She spearheaded a coalition of Atlanta businesses, foundations, academic institutions and private individuals to raise the funds to purchase the collection, which includes more than 7,000 manuscripts, among them his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize lecture. The papers will be owned by King’s alma mater, Morehouse College, and housed at the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. The first exhibition will be held at the Atlanta History Center this fall.
When she first took the reigns in Atlanta, the city was not the development pearl of the South that it is today. In fact, the city was suffering from major financial woes and a crumbling infrastructure. Franklin made significant moves in order to deliver a balanced budget to the Atlanta City Council in 2002. With a budget gap of $82 million that desperately needed to be filled, she raised taxes, water and sewer prices.
But she didn’t require citizens to bear the brunt of balancing the budget. Franklin gave herself a $40,000 pay cut and sliced the staff for her own office by 50 percent. She revoked non-essential cell phones, credit cars and automobiles owned by the city. In just three years, the city was operating in the black for the first time in more than two decades.
Just before her historic re-election, Franklin said, “We have on the books over the next five years about $24 billion in downtown investment.”
“In addition to that, we have the infrastructure developments and renewed water and sewer systems. I believe that if we have a strong infrastructure, Atlanta will continue to have economic viability into this new century.”
In 1978, Franklin began her public service career as an appointee to Atlanta’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs by then Mayor Maynard Jackson. She was later appointed by Mayor Andrew Young as the nation’s first woman chief administrative officer/city manager. In that position, she guided the development of Hartsfield International Airport (now Hartsfield Jackson International Airport).
Franklin was the top-ranking female executive when she joined the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games in 1991 as senior vice-president for external relations. The development of Atlanta’s popular Centennial Olympic Park is one of the many legacies she helped to leave behind.
Six years later, she established a firm, Shirley Clarke Franklin & Associates, which consults for strategic planning, community and public affairs.
A Philadelphia native, Franklin obtained a bachelor of arts degree in sociology from Howard University. She earned a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2002, she received an honorary Doctor of Law degree from Howard University.
Tickets for the St. Louis American Foundation’s 19th annual Salute to Excellence in Education Scholarship and Awards Banquet, presented by Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. and held Friday, Sept. 15, are available for $85 each for general seating (tables of 10 for $850), and $1,500 for a VIP/corporate table of 10. For information and tickets, please call (314) 533-8000. Look for upcoming features on this year’s special awardees, nationally recognized DJ, exciting entertainment and attendance prizes.
